Most people access the Fediverse through one of the large instances: lemmy.world, kbin, or beehaw. New or small instances of Lemmy have no content by default, and can most easily get content by linking to larger Lemmy instances. This is done manually one “Community” at a time (I spent 15 minutes doing this yesterday). Meanwhile, on larger instances, content naturally aggregates as a result of the sheer number of users. Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it’s inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances. It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.
I actually think the Fediverse is in the beginning the process of fragmenting into siloed smaller, centralized instances. Beehaw, which is on the list of top instances, just blacklisted everyone from lemmy.world. Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other. It is possible that this fragmentation and instability? of Lemmy instances will kill the viability of Federated Reddit altogether, but hopefully not.
These are my main takeaways from my three days on the Fediverse. I will stick around to see if the Fediverse can sustain itself after the end of the Reddit blackouts.
And this is why I didn’t sign up for a large instance.
I’d rather join a smaller one that doesn’t block any instance, neither is it blocked by other instances.
I just want to slowly find new communites and join the ones I think have good discussion, regardless of where they are hosted. I don’t need babysitting.
Spinning up your own solves all these issues. That’s not for everyone, myself included thus far, but ultimately, no one is going to build, maintain and host exactly what I want for free forever. That’s an unreasonable expectation in any context.
That’s true.
I’m not that invested into Lemmy yet. But if I end up using it as much as reddit, I might do this (sounds like an interesting project anyway).
For now, I’ll keep my account in a smaller / more open instance.
If anything, I think reddit was a good lesson on what happens when you let a small group of people control such a large platform. We might run into the same issues if we let a couple of instances get too large.
The first sentence of your last graf makes “might” do some really heavy lifting in the second.
I think we’ll see a full spectrum of how people use Lemmy, and I suspect in the long run, self-selection on each instance is going to make federation a far more understandable concept to people with any curiosity about it, and if everyone else wants Reddit, hey, more power to them.
You already see a lot of people congregating in the top Mastodon instances.
People might not understand that they can still communicate with the larger instances (or they might feel like it’s a “safer bet” to join the larger ones). Anyway, by the time they understand, they are not gonna create a new account in another instance.
I have so far found that explaining it as being like email (defederation aside) is not helpful.
Really? I’ve actually found the opposite.
Email is probably the only federated protocol most people still use. So they can get their heads around that.
Email does one thing and is exceedingly good at it. There are no other examples in the modern web I can think of for which there has been zero feature creep. And it is presented to the user as an application of a protocol, not the protocol itself.
That said, the past week has been made it abundantly clear that I have zero knowledge of how most people use internet connections.